Is Putin Helping Trump Get to the White House?

“The DNC hack was first revealed Tuesday, when the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike announced it had discovered two hacking collectives, linked to Russian intelligence, inside the DNC network after the DNC reported a suspected breach. In a blog post, the company identified the groups as “COZY BEAR” and “FANCY BEAR”—two “sophisticated adversaries” that “engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation.”

“We deployed our IR team and technology and immediately identified two sophisticated adversaries on the network – COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR. We’ve had lots of experience with both of these actors … In fact, our team considers them some of the best adversaries out of all the numerous nation-state, criminal and hacktivist/terrorist groups we encounter on a daily basis … Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government.”

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This breach raises a delicate question: Could Putin be trying to help Trump in his presidential aspirations?

Since the beginning of his presidential campaign, Trump saidhe would “get along very well” with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Further into the race, during an annual news conference with reporters, Putin described the mogul as “a bright and talented person without any doubt,” who according to the Russian leader was “the absolute leader of the presidential race.”

Trump returned the compliments by praising Putin: “He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” and explored the possibility of a stronger relationship with the eastern-european country: “A lot of good things could happen with Russia if we get along with Russia and if they respect us. Putin doesn’t respect our president.”

It is also known that the DNC and President Obama haven’t had the best affinity with Putin in the past 8 years. During a presidential debate, Hillary Clinton described her relationship with the Russian Mandatory as “interesting,” having clashed with him several times while serving as secretary of state.

On Wednesday, according to Gawker, an individual calling himself “Guccifer 2.0,” leaked the full 200+ page document, titled “Donald Trump Report,” to Gawker. The New York-based media outlet described the document as “an anti-trump playbook that appears to be a summary of the Democratic Party’s strategy for delegitimizing and undermining Trump’s presidential aspirations.”

The main points on the report describe the Republican presidential candidate as: “Trump has no core,” he’s running a “divisive and offensive campaign,” “bad businessman,” “dangerous & irresponsible policies,” and finally calling him “misogynist in chief.”

So, could Putin be trying to help Trump by leaking this information and preventing the Democratic Party to plan their “campaign attacks” in a timed manner throughout the general election?

The timing of the leak is certainly worth consideration, since the document was released too late in the presidential primary for it to hurt Trump and way before the general election, which is precisely when less people are paying attention to the political arena.

On a statement released Wednesday, the Republican presidential candidate said about the leak:

“We believe it was the DNC that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate and failed party leader.”

Besides the “Trump Report,” Gawker received several documents that include a variety of donor registries and other strategy files that include memos marked “confidential,” some of which appear to go back to 2008 and contain Hillary’s early talking points. According to the source, “Guccifer 2.0” claims he still has “about 100 Gb of data, including financial reports, donors’ lists, election programs, action plans against Republicans, personal mails, etc.”